European philosophy from the late seventeenth century through most of the eighteenth is broadly conceived as the "Enlightenment," a period of empricist reaction to the great seventeeth century Rationalists. This volume begins with Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists and with Newton and the early English Enlightenment. Locke is a key figure, as a result of his importance both in the development of British and Irish philosophy and because of his seminal influence in the Enlightenment as a whole. (...)British Philosophy and the Age of the Enlightenment includes discussion of the Scott Enlightenment and its influence on the German Aufklaring , and consequently on Kant. The French Enlightenment, which in turn affected the late radical Enlightenment, especially Bentham, is also considered here. This survey brings together clear, authorative chapters from leading experts and provides a scholarly introduction to this period in the history of philosophy. It includes a glossary of technical terms and a chronological table of important political, philosophical, scientific and other cultural events. (shrink)

The eighteenth century was a time of brilliant philosophical innovation in Britain. In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the period's discussion of what remains a central problem of philosophy, the question of the freedom of the will. He offers new interpretations of contributions to the free will debate made by canonical figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid, and also discusses in detail the arguments of some less familiar writers. Harris puts (...) the eighteenth-century debate about the will and its freedom in the context of the period's concern with applying what Hume calls the "experimental method of reasoning" to the human mind. His book will be of substantial interest to historians of philosophy and anyone concerned with the free will problem. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

"Under Magee's sensitive guidance a remarkably coherent interpretation of this period emerges."--Marshall Cohen, Listener. "The whole book has a marvellous air of casualness and clarity that makes it a delight to read."--Colin Wilson. Contemporary British philosophy is experiencing unprecedented openness to influences from abroad. New growth is evident in many areas of traditional philosophy which had been neglected by the logical positivists and the linguistic analysts. This sense of freedom permeates Magee's volume of conversations with leading British philosophers. (...) Under Magee's direction, the philosophers discuss other influential thinkers, such as Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, and Austin, as well as ideas of universal interest, such as morality, art, religion, and social theory. As an introduction to contemporary British philosophy, a unique collection of candid commentaries by important thinkers, and study of fresh ideas, Modern British Philosophy is consistently lively and authoritative. (shrink)

The study focuses on the debates on self-love in early 18th-century British moral philosophy. It examines the intricate relations of these debates with questions concerning human nature and morality in five central authors: Anthony Ashley Cooper the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler and Archibald Campbell. One of the central claims of this study is that a distinction between five different concepts of self-love is necessary to achieve a clear understanding of the debates on self-love. (...) Thus, egoistic self-love, self-love as love of praise, self-love as self-esteem, self-love as excessive pride and self-love as self-respect are distinguished. The role of these different concepts is analysed in the mentioned authors’ theories of human nature and morality, and the relations between the concepts of self-love and other essential concepts of moral philosophy such as benevolence, pity and virtue are examined. This study highlights the importance of the widely discussed claim that self-love is the only motive for human agents and shows that the moral rehabilitation of self-love becomes an important issue for the period. Commentators generally agree on the importance of the notion of self-love for the period’s moral philosophy, yet little attention has been paid to the different concepts of self-love. Present-day philosophy’s tendency to equate self-love with egoism is too simplistic, and the insufficient recognition of the vagueness of the notion of self-love is shown to be an impediment to an appropriate reconstruction of important arguments in the debates on self-love. The framework suggested in this study thus enables a better comprehension of the different accounts of self-love in the selected authors’ moral psychologies, and of their views of the moral value of self-love. This facilitates the shedding of light on central aspects of moral philosophy at the beginning of the 18th century. (shrink)

This paper defends an orthodox model of the linguistic intuitions which form a central source of evidence for generative grammars. According to this orthodox conception, linguistic intuitions are the upshot of a system of grammatical competence as it interacts with performance systems for perceiving and articulating language. So conceived, probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions allows us to investigate the competence–performance distinction empirically, so as to determine the grammars that speakers are competent in. This model has been attacked by Michael Devitt in (...) his recent book and a series of papers. In its place, Devitt advances a model of linguistic intuitions whereby they are speakers’ theory-laden judgements about the properties of languages. In this paper, I try to make clear the rationale behind the orthodox model and the inadequacies of Devitt's model. (shrink)

This is the first full assessment of British philosophy in the 19th century. Specially written essays by leading experts explore the work of the key thinkers of this remarkable period in intellectual history, covering logic and scientific method, metaphysics, religion, positivism, the impact of Darwin, and ethical, social, and political theory.

This book offers a reassessment of the political philosophy of the British Idealists, a group of once influential and now neglected nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophers, whose work has been much misunderstood. Peter Nicholson focuses on F. H. Bradley's idea of morality and moral philosophy; T. H. Green's theory of the Common Good, of the social nature of rights, of freedom, and of state interference; and Bernard Bosanquet's notorious theory of the General Will. By examining the arguments offered by the Idealists (...) and by their critics the author is able to penetrate the deep layers of hostile comment laid down by several generations of later writers and to show that these ideas, once properly understood, are not only defensible but interesting and important. (shrink)

From popular introductions to biographies and television programmes, philosophy is everywhere. Many people even want to be philosophers, usually in the café or the pub. But what do real philosophers do? What are the big philosophical issues of today? Why do they matter? How did some our best philosophers get into philosophy in the first place? Read New British Philosophy and find out for the first time. Clear, engaging and designed for a general audience, sixteen fascinating interviews with some (...) of the top philosophers from the new generation of the subject's leaders range from music to the mind and feminism to the future of philosophy. Each interview is introduced and conducted by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom of The Philosophers Magazine . This is a unique snapshot of philosophy in Great Britain today and includes interviews with: Ray Monk - Biography; Nigel Warburton - the Public; Aaron Ridley - Music; Jonathan Wolff - Politics; Roger Crisp - Ethics; Rae Langton - Pornography; Miranda Fricker - Knowledge; M.G.F.Martin - Perception; Timothy Williamson - Vagueness; Tim Crane - Mind; Robin Le Poidevin - Metaphysics; Christina Howells - Sartre; Simon Critchley - Phenomenology; Simon Glendinning - Continental; Stephen Mulhall - the Future; Keith Ansell Pearson - the Human. (shrink)

There is a consensus that post-war British analytic philosophy was politically neutral. This view has been affirmed by the post-war analysts themselves, and by their critics. This paper argues that this consensus-view is false. Many central analytic philosophers claimed that their empirical philosophy had liberal outcomes, either through cultivating liberal habits of mind, or by revealing truths about the world that supported liberal conclusions. These beliefs were not subject to significant scrutiny or attempts at justification, but they do help (...) us to explain the otherwise puzzling disinclination to engage with questions of political philosophy on the part of these politically active individuals. (shrink)

The basic hypothesis of cybernetics is that the chief mechanism of the central nervous system is one of negative feed-back. The field of study is not, however, restricted to feed-backs of the negative kind. Secondly, cybernetics makes the hypothesis that the negative feed-back mechanism explains purposive and adaptive behaviour. Broadly speaking what the cybernetic model does for our outlook is to make us understand how purposive behaviour can be manifested by a machine, for purposive can now be defined in terms (...) of negative feed-back. An anti-aircraft gun is purposive in the sense that it is able by means of radar to follow its target.1 Predictive behaviour is also accounted for by the same mechanism, as illustrated by a gun firing not at a point where an aeroplane is but at a point where it will bejust as a cat chasing a mouse extrapolates the mouse's path. Support for this striking hypothesis, which is of fundamental importance, is to be found both in rather general resemblances between organisms and electronic machines and in resemblances of more special kinds. (shrink)

A pervasive feature of the sciences, particularly the applied sciences, is an experimental focus on a few (often only one) possible causal connections. At the same time, scientists often advance and apply relatively broad models that incorporate many different causal mechanisms. We are naturally led to ask whether there are normative rules for integrating multiple local experimental conclusions into models covering many additional variables. In this paper, we provide a positive answer to this question by developing several inference rules that (...) use local causal models to place constraints on the integrated model, given quite general assumptions. We also demonstrate the practical value of these rules by applying them to a case study from ecology. (shrink)

European philosophy from the late seventeenth century through most of the eighteenth is broadly conceived as `the Enlightenment', the period of empirical reaction to the great seventeenth century Rationalists. This volume begins with Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists and with Newton and the early English Enlightenment. Locke is a key figure in late chapters, as a result of his importance both in the development of British and Irish philosophy and because of his seminal influence in the Enlightenment (...) as a whole. British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment includes discussion of Scottish Enlightenment and its influence on the German Aufklarung , and consequently on Kant. French thought, which in turn affected the late radical Enlightenment, especially Bentham, is also considered here. This survey brings together clear, authoritative chapters from leading experts and provides a scholarly introduction to this period in the history of philosophy. It includes a glossary of technical terms and a chronological table of important political, philosophical, scientific and other cultural events. (shrink)

Brentano's work has had, and has, its greatest influence in Austria, Germany, Poland and Italy, but its importance for an understanding of British analytical philosophy is increasingly being recognised.

Ever since Freud, psychoanalysts have explored the connections between psychoanalysis and literature and psychoanalysis and philosophy, while literary criticism, social science and philosophy have all reflected on and made use of ideas from psychoanalytic theory. The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis presents contributions from these fields and gives the reader an insight into different understandings and applications of psychoanalytic theory. This book comprises twelve contributions from experts in their fields covering philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and literary theory. The chapters are divided into (...) three distinct sections: Psychoanalysis Philosophy Social science and literary theory Louise Braddock and Michael Lacewing successfully bring these contributions together with an in-depth introduction that allows the reader to explore the connections between the different disciplines. The multi-disciplinary approach to this book is rare; it will appeal to academics and students, from the subject areas of psychoanalysis, humanities and social science. (shrink)

Early modern historians and philosophers interested in human freedom can profitably read this book, which provides a synoptic view of the eighteenth-century British free will debate from Locke through Dugald Stewart. Scholars have not ignored the debate, but as they have tended to focus on canonical figures , the author’s inclusion of lesser-known yet significant thinkers such as Lord Kames, Jonathan Edwards, and James Beattie is especially welcome. The main thesis of James Harris’s book is that the eighteenth-century (...) class='Hi'>British debate was animated by a general commitment to “experimentalism,” i.e., the view that we should be faithful to the data of our experiences of willing. Locke initiated the turn to experimentalism, but in Harris’s judgment it was Hume who first fully adopted it. Of course, Hume’s deflationary moves did nothing to slow the debate, let alone settle it, and necessitarians continued to battle libertarians. (shrink)